


no paper currency, no promises to pay

by matchsticks_p (matchsticks)



Category: Sorted (Website) RPF
Genre: Aftercare, BDSM, Choking, Consensual Violence, D/s, I don't know why I tried to individually tag pairings, M/M, OT5, Rough Sex, Safewords, Service Top, Submission, Verbal Humiliation, and everyone being very non-dramatic about it, despite all these fun tags the focus is really on one of the doms safewording out of a scene, every permutation is here, surprisingly wholesome for a fic where someone gets choked out while giving oral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 04:28:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20901650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchsticks/pseuds/matchsticks_p
Summary: Ben loves giving up all control and getting dominated to within an inch of his life, and the other boys are more than happy to help.James is happy to help too, up to the point he isn't.





	no paper currency, no promises to pay

Barry’s hand cracks across Ben’s face, the lingering sting singing sharp and sweet on his skin. It brings a tear to the corners of his eyes, but he holds off on crying just yet. He wants it to be good, he wants it broken out of him like a fountain. He wants to earn it.

“Stubborn boy,” Barry tsks, and smacks him again.

The thing is, Ben’s usually in control. He’s the one in charge in the kitchen, in their business, in the minute little everyday interactions where the rest of them fall desperately over themselves to gain his approval. But nobody can be in that much control all of the time. Sometimes, Ben needs to be the one who’s desperate.

That’s where Barry comes in. And Mike, and Jamie, and James.

Barry and Mike are very comfortable with the hands-on stuff. Hair-pulling, spanking, spitting, shoving, wrenching his arms behind his back just enough to hurt without lasting damage, holding him down and fucking his throat raw, his arse open, the whole nine yards. Barry is small but he can pack a wallop. Mike is sweet but he’s awfully good at getting into character. Jamie is more into using his words, keeping up a constant stream of chatter that varies wildly from humiliating to demeaning to cruel to cajoling. When said at just the right time, when Ben is being held open trembling and raw, a well-placed insult can land harder than any blow. Jamie’s timing is exquisite, and more often than not it’s his taunting that finally breaks Ben.

And James, he doesn't really use either. He doesn't want to hit Ben, and he’s even quieter in the bedroom than outside of it. But he wants to give Ben what he needs, so he uses what’s available to him. He’s taller than them all, broad shouldered and muscular, and he uses his size to bully Ben into position, to tower over him so he feels small and definitely too insignificant to have to worry about being in charge of anything. His sheer presence can corner, can trap, can make Ben forget about anything besides what a good boy he needs to be if he wants his reward.

They use the stoplight colours as their safety measure. They’re not so irresponsible that they wouldn’t make sure Ben has an out, and even when he’s shaking uncontrollably, his body soaked in sweat and his legs spread wide open, when he seems incapable of human speech and just cries and cries and cries, they still remember to ask him for a colour and he’ll always say green, green, go, more.

It’s James who says, “Red.”

It’s not Ben’s tears that do it. James doesn't normally have problems with seeing Ben cry. Hell, he’s licked tears off his face while fucking him before.

But it’s the combination of his tears, rolling slow and silent down his flushed cheeks as he chokes on Barry’s shaft while Jamie fondly says, “Look at you, can’t even suck cock right. You can’t do anything right, can you?” and Mike holds him from behind, one arm clamped around his belly and the other hand squeezed tight over his throat so he wouldn’t have been able to breathe even if he weren’t gagging on a mouthful of cock. It’s all of it.

All of it at once is too much for James, suddenly. He would like it to be quieter, less jeering and moaning and sobbing and wet slapping sounds, less of his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. He would like them to be at the part where Ben will let them comfort him and pet his hair and tell him he’s done so well. He would like to not be here for this part of it, maybe.

He says “Red” too quietly at first. They can’t hear him over the din. So he has to clear his throat and say it louder, more clearly. “Red.”

They all stop. Barry pulls out of Ben, and Jamie pipes down, and Mike pushes away from Ben but leaves his fingers curled loosely around his throat. They all turn to look at James, even Ben. Especially Ben, looking at him with stark bare need in his eyes. They can’t stop here. That would be mad. Ben _needs_.

James can feel his neck and ears heat up under the scrutiny. He’s turning red like the word. He scrambles up onto his feet. “I’ll just be outside. Come get me when you’re done?”

He grabs his discarded joggers on his way out the bedroom door and has just about made a clean escape when Mike pokes his head out. “Hey, you alright?”

“Yeah,” James says, pulling his sweatpants on. “Honest. I’ll be right out here.”

Behind Mike, a miasma of sounds from resuming activities floats out, softer and more bearable now that they’re muffled by the walls. It’ll be even better when Mike closes the door. Instead of doing that, Mike gives him a long look.

“Honest,” James repeats, but that doesn’t get Mike to go back inside immediately, and he thinks of Ben in there, needing, and it makes him anxious. Not that Jamie and Barry can’t take perfectly good care of him. It’s just that James would rather he have everything. “I’d rather be alone.”

Mike narrows his eyes briefly, assessing, before nodding. “Shout if you need anything,” he says before ducking back into the bedroom, finally closing the door.

James wanders first into Ben’s living room. He looses a bit of time just blanking out, processing or calming down or whatever it is his brain needs doing when it zones out. When he comes back to himself it feels like waking up. He notices he’s in the kitchen now, his feet always subconsciously taking him to where he feels most at home. 

He isn’t sure how much time has passed since he left the others, but he doesn’t want to peek in on them and risk interrupting the scene. He wants so very badly for Ben to get everything he wants, for Ben to be able to let go and stop thinking and be reduced to a creature of pure sensation. That’s what Ben wants, and more importantly it’s what he deserves, always stuck with the difficult work of being in charge of them all the time. James wants to help Ben get what he wants, even if he can’t be in the room. He can help by being patient and waiting, not disrupting, making sure he has the time and space he needs for the others to work their magic.

It takes almost two hours for James to finally hear doors opening, water running, soft murmuring voices and the slow shuffle of feet. Jamie, especially, has a lot of stamina.

Barry shows up in the kitchen first, giving James a hug when he sees him. “We missed you,” he has to go up on his tiptoes to say into James’ ear, but there’s no reproach in his voice, nothing to say James should’ve stayed when he didn’t want to. James tips his head toward the couch in the adjoining room and Barry goes along with it, sinking down onto the cushions with a satisfied sigh.

Mike drifts in next, sidling up to kiss James’ cheek. The persona he puts on to reduce Ben to a useless mess is gone, and he’s back to being all warm sunshine smiles again. “Jamie and Ben are taking a shower together,” he tells James. 

“I’m making coffee,” James tells him in return. He’s grinding cardamom pods with a mortar and pestle, and Mike says a lot of things about it being ‘proper chef-y’ until James sends him to join Barry on the sofa.

He has five cups of very decent Turkish coffee just about ready when Ben and Jamie finally emerge, scrubbed clean and fresh from their shower. In lieu of his regular clothes, Ben is bundled in a fluffy bathrobe. 

“Mate, that smells incredible,” Jamie says, running a warm hand up the skin of James’ back, and James only now realises he’s still wearing tracksuit bottoms and nothing else. He feels himself start to blush.

“This one’s yours,” he says, handing Jamie a cup. And then, because he realizes he can, he hands Jamie two more cups to take to Mike and Barry out in the living room.

Ben, meanwhile, has been looking around. “Have you been…cleaning my flat?”

“No,” James says. There’s a messy stack of magazines on the dining table that proves he’s telling the truth.

“My kitchen, then,” Ben amends. “You’ve definitely been cleaning my kitchen. I had dishes from breakfast in the sink.”

“I had time to kill. Last time at Mike’s I sharpened all his knives, but yours were already sharp, obviously.”

“You did this last time at Mike’s, too?” Ben blinks in surprise.

James isn’t surprised Ben didn’t know. He had been blindfolded and bound, being used roughly by Jamie for a change while Mike and Barry took turns flogging him, and James had quietly excused himself to putter around Mike’s kitchen. He’d re-joined them before it was over, so he could watch Ben climax and help clean him up.

“James, you know you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, right?” 

He can hear Ben assessing the situation, going back into take-charge mode, and it’s wrong, he’s not supposed to be doing that yet. He’s supposed to be relaxing, luxuriating in his well-earned afterglow. James rushes to assure him. “I do want to! I do. It’s just sometimes it gets a bit…”

“Overwhelming?”

He was just going to say ‘much,’ but overwhelming is probably more accurate, so he nods. “I want to be there, unless—” It occurs to him that maybe it ruins it for Ben to have him there, if he was going to be like this.

“Good, because I want you there too,” Ben says, before he can even finish his thought out loud. 

Something warm settles in James’ chest, and he smiles at Ben, small and happy. 

Just as he leans down to press a kiss to Ben’s forehead, Barry yells from the living room, “Oi! Enough with the chit chat in there! We want cuddles.”

They both roll their eyes and bring their coffees out with them. 

“So demanding,” Ben says, carefully picking his way through a tangle of limbs until he can get right in the middle, snug and warm on all sides. 

James sips his drink. No one beckons at him to come closer until he decides he’s ready. And when he is, he crawls across Jamie’s thighs to sprawl across the sofa that’s definitely too small for five grown men, his feet in someone’s lap and someone’s elbow in his ribs, his nose in Ben’s hair. Ben sounds sleepy and content when he quips, “Do you want me to leave my knives unsharpened for you next time, just in case?”

If that isn’t a gesture of love from a chef, he doesn't know what is.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the Sorted discord for the ideas and inspo, most especially @teaandliquor (LuminousCorruption on AO3). The full quote I've taken the title from is about service, because this is a story about service tops servicing: "For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service." The origin of said quote is beloved naturalist John Burroughs, and you can find me in hell.


End file.
